Nobura is a forgotten planet shrouded in mystery. The story goes that a cosmic being sacrificed his divine essence to give life to its desolate lands. The Etherstones shaped the planet's biomes and interconnected all living things with nature.
However, the lurking threat of the Vacuous, a parasitic force born from the depths of Nobura, poses a challenge to life on the surface, weaving a tale of divine sacrifice. Nobura has always been part of a paradoxical cycle of life and death, where the forces of creation and destruction dance in an eternal cosmic struggle.
In Etherstone , players take on the roles of faction leaders who join forces to avert impending extinction, attempting to gain as many victory points as possible through various means, such as summoning cards, overcoming threats, and using their abilities as effectively as possible.
The first phase of the game consists of selecting your hand of 7 cards and the leader card; alternatively, for the first few games, players can take a pre-filled hand of cards with the corresponding Leader.
Leaders have a set number of hit points, a power value, and a persistent asymmetric ability.
The game is played in turns, starting with the first player and continuing clockwise.
There are three types of cards in the game:
- Followers: They can help you during the attack when you are faced with a threat.
- Rituals: Powerful Spells
- Technology: Artifacts that can change your game strategy
Cards may also have abilities that activate during the roll of the dice based on the color or number chosen.
During your turn, you can only take one of the following actions:
1) Dice Draft: Etherstones contain concentrated Ether and can be spent by players to summon cards and activate powerful effects. Five different dice representing each of the Etherstones are rolled in the center of the table.
Players can draw a die from those available on display to immediately obtain 2 Etherstone tokens of that color and eventually activate the effects of the summoned cards taking into account the color drawn and the nominal value of the dice.
2) Summon: Players summon a card from their hand by paying its Etherstone cost in tokens.
3) Attack: With this attack action, the player passes a Threat card from the center of the table. He begins the attack action with an attack value of 0. He must decide whether, as a Leader, he wants to join the attack personally. If so, he adds the strength value of his Leader card to his attack value, but he will also be vulnerable to damage from the Threat. Leader cards never run out, so their card is kept upright even when used.
After this, they may exhaust any number of Ready Followers to add the Follower's strength to their attack value. Exhausted Followers are turned sideways to show that they cannot be used in attack actions until they are rested.
4) Rest: Prepare all your cards and skip your turn.
5) Void Pact: If the Leader is defeated, players will skip their turn to revive their leader to full health and will gain a Void Pact token that will be worth negative victory points at the end of the game.
There is no winning strategy or style of play.
Players will win by gaining victory points as they perform various actions, and the game will end if one of the following three game-ending conditions is met:
- The active player still has cards in his hand.
- There are no more cards in the Threat deck.
- There are no more tokens in the victory point pool.
